In Shakespeare's conception of the tragic hero we find many characteristics and some incongruities that belong to the old avengers; but there is new penetration into the sources of human motive that results in an essentially new view of the functions and scope of the tragic drama. As in most tragedies since "Tamburlaine," the play is a one-part play, presenting a hero far above the average in mental and moral power, but for the time mainly under the sway of one dominating mood or emotion. Like the other heroes of revenge tragedies, Hamlet is a good man brought suddenly face to face with evil. Again, like the heroes of Seneca and of most tragedies dealing with a reversal of fortune, Hamlet is a strong man brought to face the enmity of chance. He is an individual forced to struggle against a hostile environment. Again, he is a man in a tragic crisis that requires the exercise of all possible powers on his part if he is to avoid disaster, who finds himself afflicted with a temperamental weakness that makes failure possible or indeed inevitable. Critics emphasize now one and now another element of his character as they emphasize one or another of these conflicts as the most important. Shakespeare here, as again in later plays, united in one hero all the varieties of conflict catalogued by the critics. But if we ask which is most peculiarly Shakespearean, it must be said to be the conflict with his own temperamental unfitness, call that irresolution, melancholy, meditativeness, or what you will. Here lies Shakespeare's main differentiation from preceding tragedy, though one distinctly presaged in "Julius Cæsar." At all events, we have a conception of tragedy carried out in his succeeding plays. The hero, noble and righteous, is brought into conflict with the results of evil and circumstance, and he is crippled by his own inability or weakness. Tragedy becomes inherent in character, in the incompleteness that marks the best and mightiest of mankind.